Sunday, 24 January 2016

A change of europhile tactics

Most people have noticed that the Remain campaing is an empty husk. All we get is a daily drip of Chicken Licken panic over what might happen. The other arm of their campaign is just to keep repeating the same old lies about workers rights and investment. They don't engage or debate. They just move past the hard targets and repeat the lies elsewhere. They go quiet for a time then pop up when the coast is clear to tell the same lie.

But hereabove we see a change of europhile tactics. They have softened the rhetoric because the scare stories only have reach with the europhile diehards. The rest of us think it's hyperventilation. What we get instead is an iron fist in a velvet glove.

The headline will be spread with glee by kippers and less discerning Leavers, but those who actually read the article will see it lends itself to the europhile arguments about research programmes that the europhiles perceive to be their strongest suit with liberal-minded opinion formers. In it we also see the usual hackneyed tripe about being stronger inside a trading bloc and that it's “better to sit at the table to drive the changes than not to be invited to the table”.

Readers of this blog will know in some detail why this is unmitigated bullshit, but you have to hand it to the europhiles, it's a handy piece of maneuvering. Little manipulations are far more effective than a big lie - and even better if you can get the opposition to spread them for you.

This of course will escape most of the Leavers who won't have cottoned on that it's a confidence trick. The fact that it's an apparently Brexit favourable headline in the Guardian should cause anyone with half a brain to smell a rat immediately.

This is essentially the work of a clever campaign that knows exactly how to play the media game and how to insert messages into the public debate. It's expert media management. This however, demands a degree of subtlety that escapes the likes of Leave.EU - and could never master it even if they had a worthwhile message beyond a generic gripe against the EU. Remain is playing chess while we are playing tiddlywinks.

And this is really why I have little left but contempt for the Leave campaigns. They are so blinded by certitude and hypnotised by their own dogma they can't even begin to realise they're being used as useful idiots. At least they are useful to someone, I suppose.